The "Merging Cellar" is the place where you can share your tasting experiences and discuss everything from technique, artistic matters or even business practices, but not necessarily about Pyramix. Feel free to pick the brains of the talented Merging forum users. Enjoy.

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The "Merging Cellar" is the place where you can share your tasting experiences and discuss everything from technique, artistic matters or even business practices, but not necessarily about Pyramix. Feel free to pick the brains of the talented Merging forum users. Enjoy.

My friend Gary designed a highly successful pair of high res speakers. I couldn’t make the trip from Long Island to hear them, but as you can see his very enthused audience was quite pleased with the results when he demoed his system at a local Seattle audio club. http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-wa ... -1356.html

In addition to the overall design and performance goals, I was so taken with his choice of drivers and how he used them that I went ahead and cloned Gary’s superb midwoofers-a pair of GPA Altec 416 midwoofers in sealed birchwood cabinets, with rounded corners for low diffraction. I was then going to begin ordering the expensive autoformers and film caps to build the crossovers; later the Azurahorns, Radian drivers and RAAL ribbon tweeters. But I then realized that as I couldn’t travel 3000 miles to hear Gary’s speakers that I had better perform one very crucial test first: How will most of my recordings sound on Gary’s speakers?

So I mailed to Gary a flash drive with about 70 uncompressed WAV files of CD track rips from my CD collection. That playlist was probably a fairly accurate cross section of my entire collection. Three weeks later I got Gary’s crushing news that his system found at least 67% of them to be poor sounding and fatiguing to sit through. Either too much compression was used or mixes that were “congested” during orchestral passages. And several were quite noticeably distorted, he said.

Presumably, Gary will be checking his system for any self-generating noise and distortions, but I’d be very surprised if he found any such problems. Furthermore, Gary has an Exasound DAC which avoids the often criticized delta sigma processing. Veteran audio design engineer Lynn Olson, who collaborated on the design of Gary’s speakers and designed the pair of 300B power amps that Gary built himself, was likewise very pleased with the tonality of the Exasound DAC. http://www.nutshellhifi.com/ and http://www.exasound.com/

Since many of the recordings in the rest of my collection are apt to have much the same flaws as those I sent Gary, I thought about restoration software. Googling [ audio restoration software ] readily turned up Cedar Audio. They offer a plugin dedicated to distortion removal, and at >$3500., their DeClip must be one very powerful algorithm. http://www.cedaraudio.com/products/camb ... clip.shtml

Their Phase Corrector can also likely work wonders with recordings with poor FR and other issues. http://www.cedaraudio.com/products/camb ... hase.shtml However, that one only comes bundled in Cedar's Cambridge DAW platform, starting at $18K. Not surprisingly, many of Cedar's clients are in government and forensic science.

So as Cedar’s software are beyond my budget, I emailed all of their US dealers for referrals to more affordable solutions-ones that would be effective but without leaving artifacts for Gary’s mercilessly telling horns to throw into my room.

Would Izotope RX5’s DeClip be the second best to Cedar’s >$3500. deClip plugin for distortion removal?

And is there an affordable counterpart to Cedar’s Phase Corrector? ~ $1000.?

I'd have ~ $1200. to spend on each.

But what’s equally important is that even if Gary only found the restored files to sound slightly improved, I might then need to resort to cone drivers rather than Gary’s horns and drivers to use above Gary’s Altec midwoofers. Those drivers in the right enclosures and with an appropriately designed crossover should make my less than perfect recordings sound reasonably attractive, without too much dumbing down the sound quality of my great recordings.

Of course, I’d much prefer building Gary’s speakers to spec, as he raved about how my better recordings sounded on his system. But I’d have to weigh that decision against my larger number of distorted or otherwise flawed recordings-and how well that Isotope RX5 or better yet still affordable restoration software can make them sound their best. Please advise.